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- Creator:
- César Roberto Olivas
- Description:
- Using the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending this paper aims to show how Spanish-speaking ghost story tellers think and talk about death, the afterlife, and ghosts. Based on the language of personal supernatural experiences recounted on the popular Mexican call in radio show La Mano Peluda (1995-2018), the study is a qualitative linguistic investigation into how ghost stories construe the end of life. This work proposes a Conceptual Blending model of ghosts which offers a topological view of how callers organize and elaborate on concepts related to death. Additionally the blending model anchors the analysis of patterns discovered within the data. These patterns include two prevailing metaphorical roles ghosts facilitate in the stories: GHOST AS A MESSENGER, and GHOST AS A GUARDIAN. These roles contribute to the notion of death as a continuation of existence for the deceased through vigilance and protection from the afterlife construed as Heaven. The results show the cultural influence of religious ideas in structuring metaphorical expressions regarding death and death-related concepts. The conceptual preference towards Christian beliefs regarding the end of life, play a crucial role in the positive evaluation of ghost encounters in the narratives.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- San Francisco
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Willey, Patrick
- Description:
- While it is a basic truism that the meaning of a text is largely dependent on its historical context, models of interpretation that all too readily assume the stasis of the past and which fail to relativize the present in their will to hermeneutic truth fall short of accounting for the complexity of our engagement with the past as it is mediated through various modes of literary representation. A critical tool is needed in order to rethink our relationship with the past as it is mediated through literature. The dramatic monologues of Robert Browning offer one way to re-conceptualize history as a category in our attempt to make meaning out of complex, self-conscious artifacts. More than anything, his reproach of the abstract lyrical subject that dominates the Greater Romantic Lyric characterizes the dramatic monologue as a critical tool that forces us to question, and ultimately reject, the notion that history excludes craftsmanship. Rather than reinforce a reductive view of the past, Browning’s experiments with the dramatic monologue encourage us to reflect on the very preconditions of historicism: our “felt historicity,” or being in time. The Ring and the Book manifests Browning’s final attempt to synthesize the dramatic monologue with a long narrative poem that takes history as its subject. Through the dramatic monologue, Browning attempts to exorcise vestiges of Romanticism, which threaten to reducethe autonomy of the readerto a function of the author’s sincerity. By countering inherited beliefsin the integrity of the lyricpersona, he offers a radical revision of history.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Fresno
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Colin James Flynn
- Description:
- The setting for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is the American-Mexican southwest borderlands in the middle of the nineteenth century. McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, meanwhile, takes place in the same region at the end of the twentieth century. In No Country for Old Men, descriptions of natural landscapes that dominate Blood Meridian have fallen away while much of the story itself takes place indoors and in automobiles. This thesis evaluates the narrative implications of such a transition in McCarthy’s work, relating the transition to historical changes in the American landscape between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the genres of the western and the noir.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- San Francisco
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Zoe Elizabeth Dumas
- Description:
- As technology becomes ever-prevalent in modem society and our lives are documented for all to see on a daily basis, it is more important than ever that we understand the role of narrative in our media. This project explores works of horror fiction that work upon the conceit of being a found text that is in some way representative of the real world. I argue that these texts, rather than just being an adrenaline rush, are able to teach us how to be better readers of the world around us. I study a breadth of horror texts, focusing specifically on the film The Blair Witch Project, the novel House of Leaves, and the Twitter story “Dear David.” Each text ushers in a new mode of horror, in which we never know who—or what—we can trust. This new, modem horror posits that we must be wary of the nefarious powers that run our everyday lives through technology and social media.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- San Francisco
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Melissa Thea Valk
- Description:
- This thesis dissects the role of melancholic imagery and religion in Alfred Tennyson’s poetry, with a special focus on his magnum opus, In Memoriam A.H.H (1850) and how the use of melancholy and religion act as rhetorical tropes in conveying the depths of his grief after losing his dear friend, Arthur Hallam. Furthermore, I analyzed particular cantos adjacent to a few of his other poems such as “The Lady of Shalott” (1833 and 1842), “Mariana” (1830), and “The Sleeping Beauty” (1830). The use of melancholic imagery is abundant in Tennyson’s work, but this thesis argues that upon the death of Arthur Hallam, Tennyson reconfigured his melancholic aesthetic that we see in his older poems to fit the melancholic tone in his elegy. Therefore, I trace Tennsyon’s original aesthetic of melancholy in his more fantastical works and how he reconfigures his aesthetic through the writing process of In Memoriam, shifting from a romantic and colorful melancholy to a confrontation of a dark and grim grief and its place in the interrelation between faith and doubt. The shift in Tennyson’s aesthetic of melancholy and cantos in In Memoriam work brilliantly together when intertwined not only with each other, but also with Tennyson’s beautiful command of meter, diction, and syllabic dexterity. The death of Tennyson’s beloved friend Arthur Hallam was the catalyst for Tennyson’s artistic manifestation of grief and doubt employed in In Memoriam as well as the religious odyssey Tennyson embarks on for seventeen years after Hallam’s death. This grief and doubt intertwine with Tennyson’s reconfigured aesthetic and serves to speak to and unite his Victorian audience because they both embraced the notion of depression as a unifying human emotion and related to him on a religious level. Because Tennyson’s writing invokes melancholy and discusses mental illness, particularly depression, his poetry serves as unifying in the face of death. His understanding of his religion plays a similar role in unifying Victorian and modern readers alike with a common human emotion. This thesis ends with an analysis of The Prologue, which serves as the final admission of Tennyson’s baptism of fire and how he is able to heal himself through the love and salvation of Christ.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- San Francisco
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Nikolas Paul Bunton
- Description:
- The aim of this thesis is to explore and analyze David Lynch’s films noir through a psychoanalytic lens, predominantly employing Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories to dissect and explicate these films. This thesis defines and explores what I call “Lynchian noir”; that is, I make the case that Lynch’s films noir carve out a distinct and idiosyncratic niche in the film noir canon and aesthetic. I make the claim that Lynch’s films noir are a particular offshoot of what some scholars have termed postmodern neo-noir and meta-noir, and that the Lynchian manifestations of postmodern neo- and meta-noir deftly translate the psychological processes of the unconscious mind into powerfully unsettling cinematic experiences. In particular, Lynch’s films noir are cinematic reflections of the unconscious as it attempts to fantasmatically cope with psychic trauma, the distressing enigma of human desire, and the alienating illusion of identity.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- San Francisco
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- McLaughlin, Melanie
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Penuliar, Jonathan Bernard
- Description:
- English learners are one of the most rapidly growing student demographics in the United States. However, school systems have historically fallen short in providing English learners with adequate academic support. A review of the literature sheds light on academic tracking as a major factor in restricting access to the rigorous coursework English learners need to achieve at levels commensurate with their English-only speaking peers. Students tracked into the English language development pipeline have difficulty exiting. Those who do not reclassify and persist in this track experience lower levels of high school graduation and college completion. Several recent shifts in educational policy are seeking to address this problem. New language and curriculum standards, as well as detracking practices, have given rise to a more distributed approach to teaching English learners where all teachers have a responsibility to support this population. Through an explanatory sequential mixed methods design, this study examined the social networks a school has built around teaching English learners and how those networks impact the flow of social capital used to support this demographic of students. Research questions include: 1. Who do educators turn to for advice and information regarding the education of English learners? 2. How do social networks shape opportunities for educators to build social capital around teaching English learners? The first phase collected survey data in order to highlight advice and information seeking behaviors. After social network analysis, the results from phase one informed phase two. The second phase included interviews from salient actors to provide further depth into creating a rich description of the ELD networks at the research site and how they impact the English learner experience.
- Resource Type:
- Dissertation
- Campus Tesim:
- San Marcos
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Gravelle, Jessica Spike
- Description:
- While many critics note the numerous musical allusions in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey, this thesis examines the appropriation of jazz in particular to these three American texts. Because of its own hybrid roots, jazz represents a voice of multiculturalism, and emerges as a symbol in all three texts of the inherent hybridity of American culture.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Vang, Linda.
- Description:
- The Hmong are undergoing a process of acceptance and rejection in forming their new Hmong American identities. As borderlands citizens, the Hmong’s new identities reflect the bicultural communities around them, and therefore, exemplify both Hmong and American values. In their formation of this identity, the Hmong are reevaluating all aspects of their history and culture, and their rhetorical gestures illustrate a reconceptualization of Hmong ways within the context of America, thereby reconfiguring Hmong American hybridity. As the Hmong accept certain western ideals and preserve certain Hmong traditions, their transnational, collective, and individual identities and ideologies change accordingly. Organizations like Stone Soup and Lao Family are assisting Hmong Americans in this process through the programs they offer, while also promoting Hmong visibility. Their gestures and language highlight the Hmong people as an asset to the wider community. The Hmong’s identity negotiation is particularly influencing the lives of Hmong American women as they struggle for gender equality. Their stories and their negotiation of a new identity are being portrayed through the literary works of Hmong American women, particularly those of Kou Vang. Through rhetorically significant acts, Hmong Americans are all obtaining new identities and voices, marking the start of a new era for the Hmong people in America.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Fresno
- Department:
- English